So, I went on what was supposed to be a vacation in Florida. Sounds relaxing, right? Except my body apparently didn’t get the memo. I stopped breathing, went into a coma, and had a dream where Jesus said, “Do not doubt me.” Not exactly the kind of thing you casually note in your medical chart.

The doctors weren’t super helpful in figuring out what actually happened. Most likely, it was my brainstem compression—the part of your brain that controls breathing—plus the fun bonus of seizures. But in true medical comedy-of-errors style, they assumed a young person who stops breathing must have overdosed and actually put “medication overdose” in my chart. Zero proof. Classic.

Meanwhile, my symptoms have been steadily worsening over the last eight years. I started off semi-functional, now I’m mostly not, because for three of those years I spent convincing doctors that my problems had to be from my concussion, only to be met with skepticism and misdiagnosis. Somehow, I survived all of this and even wrote a book about it, which is probably the only sane thing I’ve done in the last decade.